It's not decentralised or even democratic. And it will even less be so if people switch to Gavins' fork.
If PEOPLE choose to run nodes on XT, then XT will be the strongest chain. If people stick with Core, core will continue being the main chain. That's all. The devs can do whatever. At the end of the day, Bitcoin is nothing without the people running nodes. The people will decide what solution they prefer.
How many actual
people (or humans) are left running full nodes currently? I thought that only large ASIC/server farms were doing that now. This proposal centralizes bitcoin even more because it makes it more expensive to run a node meaning that it favors the large mining cartels. This is a centralization coup to control all the future development. If Gavin can get the big boys to switch, then he controls the network, because it would obviously be easier to get them to switch again next time. Because with each centralization fork (TPS scalability increase), there will be fewer and fewer nodes to convince to switch protocols each time until there is just one giant GVINODE!!! At that point, the only person he has to convince to make a change to the protocol will be himself, which is incidentally the way BitShares works for
every user (not just the king). Every user has to convince themselves what fork they want to support, then they vote their conscious, and the blockchain counts the votes and instantly implements the consensus.
Gavin is not just promoting his proposed bill, he is fast tracking it through Congress and will sign it into law weather you like it or not. He controls the protocol that mints your money. Of course he would not be so audacious as to raise the 21 million coin limit today, but when he controls the Gavinode, then pure power is just a mouse click away.
Wow....first the TPP, then the Freedom Act, now the Gavinode.
Is bitcoin more centralized today than it was 2 years ago? We continue down this path toward centralization for the perceived benefit of "scalability"
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-06-02/americas-biggest-secret-wikileaks-raising-100000-reward-leaks-tpphttp://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-06-02/freedom-1-0-surveillance-state-maybe-senate-passes-un-amended-usa-freedom-act-billThe battle for decentralization is never ending. Good thing that we live in a community where our voices are heard and our votes are counted!
As far as I know, running a node is simply having your Bitcoin Core (or XT) wallet sync and open. That's all.
As far as industrialization of mining. This was something satoshi predicted. He knew making money off bitcoin mining for the average single person with a computer would only be profitable at the beginning, and as time goes on professionals would gather to do it, so I don't see the big fuzz about this.
Don't get me wrong, I think the 20MB idea is useless and only a small patch, but staying 1MB is equally stupid (including LN, which has elements of centralization too anyway).